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Should I start with Native?? (Unique situation) (11)

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Hi, I'm going to start running some CPA campaigns for the first time and wanted to have an opinion on the best way for starting it up, given my unique situation.

Background: I'm new running CPA offers but I have decent experience in online marketing and business, especially search ppc and email (6 figures a year consistent), so I'm not a full newbie but in a way a newbie running affiliate offers and native ads, so there will be some learning curve on the unique things of them.

Explanation of why i don't wanna use Adwords for CPA campaigns: I currently use Adwords for products that are 100% white hat and non-affiliate, and I want to keep the traffic and business for the CPA campaigns completely separate. --- Basically I'm scared of messing up with one of my best performing traffic sources and i don't wanna do anything affiliate related on Adwords, not even on a separate account.

That's why the main option for doing CPA that I was thinking about was Native ads. (Revcontent) --- I feel strong at copywriting and the medium just feels good to me, I think the traffic you can attract has quality and if you figure out the way to drive it at a profit it's a source that could be potentially used long term.

FB ads would be another option but I've had an account blocked recently and honestly it's a pain in the ass. Learning how to do FB properly nowadays would be my second option maybe. I like that you can be more direct and aggressive on native though.

I wanna stay away from pop ads because I want a traffic source that can scale up to 5-6 figures a day for the long term and is not overly saturated, etc... (As I've been reading about pop)

I've read about Mobile too but don't know much about it or how it works, only about Adwords/FB mobile traffic.

Therefore, with a budget of around $5K to spend on traffic, do you give me green light to start with native? I would try to focus on secondary geos and low payout offers at the start, to reduce the cost of testing each campaign.

Question: Do you see it as a valid option for starting up with this budget or do you think I would burn it on testing 100%?

Any tips on finding low payout offers for native or how to approach it will be very helpful too. Thank you very much.

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Why don´t you try Bing Ads?

Works exactly the same as Adwords which means you can use your ppc skills.

Next to this you can also run your current campaigns on Bing.

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Thanks for the advice @eurosen. I tried Bing for some of my campaigns but couldn't really achieve the same results. Most of the keywords/ads we are using weren't accepted on Bing, so daily traffic and conversions were quite low.

Maybe with different keywords on another niche would work though, but not sure if enough traffic to make big daily figures there, long term?

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Hey Style13, I'm in a similar situation myself, been involved in internet marketing in various ways over the past few years with success. I recently decided CPA marketing was a good choice and decided to dive head first into it. Tried a ton of shit since then, failed at a ton of shit since then, lost a ton of money since then, and finally.. am making money.

I'm not an expert in paid CPA marketing by any means, however I've been able to find success with native ads. If I were to average everything out to make it easier to talk about I probably wasted $2,000 trying different traffic sources, then when I found one that brought conversions (was still losing money every day) I spent around another $1000 optimizing my campaign through removing bad placements, testing different creatives, testing offers, and testing landing page optimizations. After that it's been nothing but green.

I can't say that $5,000 will bring you profit since everyone's situation is different and each person will try their own unique twist at internet marketing, but given what it took for me to hit profits, $5,000 should be a great starting point and definitely has potential to get you to where you want to be. Keep in mind that the higher the payout of the offer you choose to test the larger budget you will need. Personally, I stuck with offers less than $15.

If you want add me on skype and we can chat a bit about stuff: ryan.thames.

The last period is needed in my username to find me

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i think you would burn it testing. theres no reason to just run something whitehat on adwords imho

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Looks to me like you already decided to go with the native route, but you just need we confirm it for you

It can be hit or miss, even in tier 3 geos there is competition nowadays (thanks to many popular COD offers).
In that case you can consider MGID, I had better results with them in tier 3 than RevContent (that actually sucked a lot there, and it's mostly for the tier 1 game).
Turned profitable after spending like 2-3k, but then it still flopped after few days.

One thing native will learn you though is patience, everything takes like 3 times longer there (like approvals), so you will think good about the steps you are doing and may prevent stupid mistakes.

You can also consider stayign with Adwords as @johnaff above me said, you are kinda limiting yourself.

P.S. If aggressive style of running is what you are looking for you can also consider pops or adult, but then you have too many choices again

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Thanks for your response and advice @rtking, just added you to Skype. (Sergio)


I'm almost decided to start with mobile now but still considering native as a great alternative, so we can talk about it and keep track of our progress.

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Currently running only white/grey hat there and having it very hard to scale up, every time I try to push it a bit to increase traffic I get the "limited" status in new ads and I get panicked about it.


I was thinking about joining or creating an Adwords mastermind for helping me push myself a bit and others and learn from each other mistakes/strategies. You can get comfortable/complacent/fearful in that platform and it's hard to grow up.

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Thanks for your response @erikgyepes.


Current status:


I have been reading as much as I could about native and mobile/pops these last days and I think that I'm finally going to go the mobile route for starting up. --- Specially because of the fact that I think it will be easier to find an abundant number of low payout offers, and I will be able to get much more data and try more variations with my initial budget, which I think will allow me to learn the subtleties and mistakes of the medium faster.


"Pops" sounded as something very obscure a few days ago, but now I can see the similarities (and advantages/disadvantages) with other traffic sources, and actually understand the basics to at least be able to start running some campaigns on it and testing offers, after reading some posts yand threads here.


I think one of the biggest challenges in marketing is to know how to convert that "cold" traffic into positive conversions and profit, so it is very important to dominate and understand the traffic sources that one uses as deep as possible.


I feel positive right now about the combination of pop/mobile traffic + low payout/instant gratification offers. I think I will document my journey in the forum and be open to any guidance or tips that the community can offer me and anyone on a similar situation, I'm finding very helpful people here. --- (I still have a lot of "knowledge voids" about tracking, the necessity of cloaking or not, best targeting settings and many more that I will work on filling up in the next weeks)


Still a long way ahead but I'm willing to learn through action + listening to people who are already dominating the medium. Thanks again.

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I'm not saying starting with pop is the wrong choice - but please do remember to expand to other traffic types ASAP, so that you're not running pop exclusively. I've jotted down some of my thoughts about pop in this post:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...l=1#post321311


And if you're planning on starting with native later - this tool will be indispensible:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ative-Spy-Tool

Ripping campaigns for tier 3/4 geos that have positive/uptrends on Adplexity Native is a good way to start based on what I've heard.

Best of luck! And feel free to keep us posted on progress.



Amy

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What vertical are you running?

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